Do libertarians like Peter Thiel really want to live in America?

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It sounds like “Fantasy Island” meets “The Twilight Zone” — a privately funded island nation created for the sole purpose of escaping government.

In the olden days, corporate titans just hired pricey lawyers and accountants to dodge the watchful eye of government regulation and the law. But thanks to record economic inequality that has enriched the already-wealthy more than ever, a group of investors has the spare millions to build an entirely man-made ocean-bound nation where they can make the rules up themselves. It’s Libertarianism 2.0: the final, floating frontier.

In a recent profile by Details magazine, it was revealed that PayPal founder and libertarian activist Peter Thiel has contributed $1.25 million dollars to the Seasteading Institute, a plan hatched by the grandson of free market economist Milton Friedman to establish “new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters — free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country.” The Details profile explains, “They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050.” Already, plans are underway to launch an office complex off the coast of San Francisco next year, adding full-time housing settlements on the island seven years later.

Don’t like the idea of tax dollars paying for public schools or highway construction or Medicare — or don’t like the idea of taxes at all? The brave new floating world offers just the solution. And if the self-appointed creators wish it, there would be no restrictions on guns or automatic weapons. Or, for that matter, no prohibition against murder. Pesky “moral suasion”!

The seasteading project is a bright and shiny warning buoy, heralding the dangerous agenda of otherwise tame-seeming libertarians. It raises the question of whether libertarians want to prune back American government or eliminate it altogether. This is not an idle concern. Prominent Libertarians want to abolish the Federal Reserve, FEMA and the TSA and that may be just the start. Until 2006, the Libertarian Party Platform explicitly supported the right of political entities, private groups and even individuals to secede from the federal government. Fearing this seemed too extremist, Libertarians replaced that platform plank with a clause about the right of people to abolish the government anytime it destroys individual liberty — a very narrow and ominous reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Sure, most libertarians may not want to do away entirely with the idea of government or, for that matter, government-protected rights and civil liberties. But many do — and ironically vie for political power in a nation they ultimately want to destroy. Even the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter mocked the paradox of Libertarian candidates: “Get rid of government — but first, make me president!” Libertarians sowed the seeds of anti-government discontent, which is on the rise, and now want to harvest that discontent for a very radical, anti-America agenda. The image of libertarians living off-shore in their lawless private nation-states is just a postcard of the future they hope to build on land.

Strangely, the libertarian agenda has largely escaped scrutiny, at least compared to that of social conservatives. The fact that the political class is locked in debate about whether Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry is more socially conservative only creates a veneer of mainstream legitimacy for the likes of Ron Paul, whose libertarianism may be even more extreme and dangerously un-patriotic. With any luck America will recognize anti-government extremism for what it is — before libertarians throw America overboard and render us all castaways.

I was one of the more progressive voices in the Libertarian movement. I left the party as it became more corrupted in the 90′s. The not-so-smart-ALEC-y astroturfed version we see today reminds us how money can easily corrupt smaller parties. The Koch brothers used the party as a test bed for the Tea Party of today. I think most can agree to the Libertarian principal that the U.S. should not be the worlds policeman, every time. Drone strikes instead of invasion is a more “limited government” response, but does the current brood of Libertarians credit Obama for this progress? Do they really want to stop the drug war, or stand by the freedom to marry who you want? They have sold their souls for some “Lines of Koch”.

I think the Somalian coast would be the perfect place for the island, lest they (God forbid) benefit from the U.S. government subsidizing the maritime safety of this foreign entity. I guess we can look forward to watching their “Lord of the Flies” emergency management response someday.

In response to combabus, I can say that all of my libertarian friends do, in fact, support marriage equality and are especially passionate about the need to end the drug war. In fact, organizations that David and Charles Koch have donated a lot of their their money to support the very same things (note: some adult language in linked post) http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/24/evil-k och-bros-support.

Sally, this piece isn’t just bad, it’s silly. In fact, it may be the silliest treatment of libertarianism I’ve ever read. There are many people on the left who have engaged and criticized libertarianism in earnest. They deserve respect. Why not be part of that group? You don’t appear to know anything about libertarian ideology, and perhaps worse, you’ve clumsily aggregated and smeared a diverse group. Put yourself in their shoes: If you stumbled onto (if?) a conservative writer smearing liberals as hysterical, murder-condoning moral voids whose only goals are power and destruction, would you take him or her seirously?

Does Sally know anything about Libertarianism? Id wager No, absolutely nothing. Liberty hinges on things like the harm principle, you can only do things that do not impose on other peoples freedoms, so Murder as she suggests would not be legal at all, as that is a complete violation of other peoples liberty

She also goes down the further tactic of muddying the waters by comparing libertarians to anti gay or anti equality idiots. These people seek to force their views on others, while Libertarians want to let people live their own lives and do whatever they want. Libertarianism is in fact the most pro equality world view there is, whilst views such as aboloshing the Fed actually make an awful lot of economic sense

In response to the title of the piece, I doubt they would want to live in the US where the constitution which was very pro individual freedoms has been trampled on and Government now has far too much control and direction over peoples lives

If this piece was an objective and sensible critique of libertarianism I would not have commented, but the nonsense and narrow mindedness that has been written is just a joke.

This is precisely why Obama won’t propose substantial mortgage relief after the recess. He needs to twist the republican’s arms about corporate taxes and a vat tax on the debt ceiling committee and that will let him save mortgage relief mostly for the campaign trail, combined with a tax hike on the wealthy.

Peter Thiel is a maggot. and taking a corporation to an oil derrick has to be treason. He probably contributed nothing to Paypal’s business model; all he did was birth elon musk’s manchild, per the wikirecord. I can only imagine he wants to offshore before a VAT tax slaps paypal in the kisser. Anyway to build a water-based corporate hell, Thiel has to love his business more than his person. Shame he can’t sleep with it, and it won’t give him (em)sympathy. He can only tell St. Peter at the pearly gates that he worshipped Mammon and hope he doesn’t get dropped into exquisite torture.

This article is based entirely on the original Details post, which is in parts grossly inaccurate.

My name is Dan Dascalescu, and I am an ambassador for The Seasteading Institute – http://seasteading.org/ambassadors#dan. The Institute is a non-profit entity and has no plans to build floating office complexes. Also, The Institute is entirely apolitical, and the libertarianism of its largest donor, Mr. Thiel, is of little relevance to our mission.

For an official rebuttal of the Details article, please see http://www.seasteading.org/blogs/main/20 11/08/26/the-seasteading-institutes-posi tion-recent-details-article.

For the for-profit venture (not sponsored by Mr. Thiel) which is actually working on launching an office complex off the coast of San Francisco, please see http://blueseed.co

This article is obviously about a bunch of nut jobs. There are many millions of americans who would like to see the size and scope of government decreased. To equate a few idiots who want to live on an oil rig with the rest of us is offensive. Sally’s social justice rehtoric is straight out of the democratic play book. President Obama’s idealogy has failed miserably here and everwhere else it has been tried. Sally looks young in the photo, so I assume she is a product of our dumbed down education system.

• People who want to control everything are bad socialists. People who want to *pwn* every single atom dead or alive in the universe are fair and square capitalists.

• *Freedom* would be maximized if a single productive producer owned the whole world, and all living beings had to *contract* with him in a mutually beneficial agreement (Win-Win) to eat. And drink water. And breathe. Because if you’re not paying for the air in your lungs, you’re a lazy moocher.

Rhetorical question, especially for theinfamoush6: If a society is free, should you not be free to leave it? If we are free to leave the US if we do not like it, how can “taking a corporation to an oil derrick” be treason?

I was under the impression that reporters did research before they wrote pieces like this. Libertarians support murder? Where did an idea like this come from other than a deep misunderstanding of Libertarianism. Get rid of government? Who will enforce contracts? Maintain order? Protect our civil rights? These are such foolish assumptions it makes me cringe. I’m embarrassed for you.

Limited government doesn’t mean no government. We’ve been at war for 10 years. Unemployment is through the roof. A good education, medical care, the ability to save for retirement… all are out of reach for so many. The more money and power we give to the government, the bigger these problems become. Too much power in too few hands.

Libertarians want peace, not war. Under Obama, we simply get more war in more places. Libertarians want freedom, not oppression. Gay marriage? Get rid of marriage licenses all together, then nobody need worry about who marries who. Libertarians want free markets. Hate oil subsidies? Hate corporate welfare? Where does this originate from? The government!

Libertarians want what everyone else wants. Happiness and freedom. We just have a slightly different idea how to get there. It’s a simple concept… let people live their lives peaceably.

Stop your fear mongering and do the slightest bit of research on the subject. You may come away with a much better understanding of what Libertarianism is all about.

rusted angel, haven’t you seen diamonds are forever? do you want a corporation on a oil rig where your minions run a business for you? or are you an evil genius who likes to stroke a white fluffy cat? do you want to build a space elevator?

just like moonraker, diamonds are forever is nothing like the book. have only seen tinker, tailor, soldier, spy so i can’t commment on that. soldier sailor richman poorman beggarman THIEF.

I don’t understand why people react so harshly to those of us who don’t want to be ruled by leaders someone else selected. Go ahead, do your your democracy thing here. We want to go to our thing somewhere else. We have offered loads of money to poor countries for land, but international courts won’t allow them to sell us sovereign land. So, we’re building a “somewhere else”.

You guys are as bad as social conservatives. You want to use laws to enforce your opinions, including those opinions concerning redistribution of wealth, guns, central banking. If you don’t want to be “exploited” by our profit motives, let us go away. Some of you are secretly conscious of it, and others are ignorant to it, but in the end, you want us to stay.

It’s -our- money you want to redistribute. It’s our ideas and creations that make life great. Every reason given to try and validate the obligation to wealthy and/productive people – goes right out the window if we agree to leave. So now you have to deride our exit.

This doesn’t even begin to address that government favors the wealthy.
The sweeping authority you hand over to government to tax Big Evil Corporations, is the same sweeping authority they use to let corporations get away with all kinds of fraud and theft.
But lets not pretend that all wealthy people and Corporations got there by shady or fraudulent means.

We don’t like personal welfare, corporate welfare, or warmongering. We’re the minority in these regards, so we can’t win in your coercive democratic duopoly.

Lastly,
Moderate libertarians (who you would still consider radical) aren’t trying to abolish all government, so equating or conflating them with Seasteading anarchists like me and Patri is fallacious.

“And if the self-appointed creators wish it, there would be no restrictions on guns or automatic weapons. Or, for that matter, no prohibition against murder.”

I honestly feel very sorry for you, Sally. Not only is this article the most vomit of mental surrender I have ever read, but you should be ashamed of yourself for dumbing down the poor saps who believe this tripe. Pandering to the credulous aside, you’ve certainly discredited yourself among the more reasonable, and intelligent, among us.

So you formulate your preferred economic policies based on James Bond movies? And here I was afraid that you would respond with something ridiculous. For good measure, I see you’ve followed it up with an excellent straw man argument comparing me (and I can only assume libertarians by association) with caricature bond villains. Clearly you are deep thinker who’s ideas regarding economic and fiscal policies should be carefully considered.

Libertarianism drew me in at first, because I was was against foreign wars and for personal freedoms and only disagreed on trade policy and some role of government points. I saw new ideas, good and bad, being formulated in the years I was actively involved, many of us were considered “third way moderates” back then. Eventually, the formal party subscribed to an unholy alliance with the right, for common libertarian-ish goals like deregulation. It is in this concept where the current GOP-Libertarian hybrids fail, and ensure that purest Libertarians will never beget the utopia they seek.
Can any individual gain fairness in court against a corporation with a legal team, and perhaps a crony judge? Understand that the GOP/TeaParty/Kochs/CronyCaps are only playing under this guise of Libertarianism; because you can not have deregulation BEFORE empowering the legal recourse for those who would be victimized by deregulation. The GOP/LIB push an agenda of deregulation AND tort reform, a sure fire FAIL for the individual. Now Libertarians have been rebranded and sold by those who could fund redefining the meaning of the word until it fit their souless corporatist agenda. Ask yourself, how do you win in a court case against the company that poisoned you to death?

How dare they want to make it easier for people to escape from being associated with people who bomb brown and black people, to escape from having their property confiscated, to escape from being spied on, to escape from being assaulted and kidnapped because they consume what the state says they can’t, and so on.

“With any luck America will recognize anti-government extremism for what it is — before libertarians throw America overboard and render us all castaways.”

Don’t worry. The pro-government extremists are furiously working to lower the standard of living in the US to something akin to that of Zimbabwe. We won’t have to fear being thrown overboard because we will be drowning in our own feces.

We all should be careful about using labels to describe individuals or groups of people. Labels such as conservative, liberal, left, right and others mean different things to different people. They are often used to convey derogatory sentiments. As such they are generalizations, obfuscatory and divisive forms of discourse. The use of such language is no different than the the derogatory words used to characterize Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Italians, Irish… throughout our cultures history. The significant difference between these two groups of language is merely semantics.

This is ridiculous
“Or, for that matter, no prohibition against murder. Pesky “moral suasion”!”

The entire argument of libertarians is precisely that they believe murder, theft, fraud, torture, and slavery are wrong. They believe it is so wrong that State officials should never be allowed to engage in those activities. Unfortunately the state system is only able to function by engaging in activities that are illegal for everyone else. It depends on institutional injustice. Which is why people dependent on the state freak out whenever libertarians suggest that maybe it isn’t ok for the state to rob, defraud, kidnap, torture, and kill people.

While I don’t think Sally Kohn explicitly supports criminal behavior, she doesn’t seem to realize that she does condone institutional injustice.

In 2011 we live in a world in which is state officials admit to torture. It used to be that torture was un-American.

Libertarians simply take very seriously the idea of equal rights – if it is wrong for one person do something wrong it is wrong for everyone else. Peace, liberty, and property go together, you can’t have one without the others.

I’d love to hear Sally Kohn’s explanation of why it was ok for the American colonists to secede and declare their independence. Or was it un-American of them?

[...] Kohn opinion piece in question is posted at the Reuters blog under the headline “Do libertarians like Peter Thiel really want to live in America?” Right off the bat, she makes fun of the idea of the Seasteading Institute. The idea of building [...]

The author is a talking head on FOX News, as she boasts on her web site. Evidently, FOX is taking the same “logic” that they’ve used to advocate hard-right-wing extremism in the past, and starting to apply it to hard-left-wing extremism too.

This piece has all the same elements of a FOX article — assertions of dark conspiracies behind “ordinary-looking people,” hyperbole about “destruction of the country,” etc.

The author even posted a self-congratulatory “dear libertarians” piece on her web site, claiming to have received lots of criticism and instructing libertarians to not be Evil Anti-American Murderers if we don’t want to be criticized by her again.

As an anarchist, I’m not sure why the author has a problem. We’re not trying to topple the US government as the author spuriously claims, but are merely trying to leave and go elsewhere. Are you saying expatriation is dangerous? What about all the 19th and 20th century leftists that have expatriated? Ever heard of Earnest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Are you saying that people are not allowed to leave the US if we would rather live elsewhere with more freedom? Is this East Germany behind the wall?

Furthermore, what happened to our imagination? People used to think that the future would look like the Jetsons…why are you limiting the various ways human society organizes itself? If seasteading is possible, it’s an amazing development in the progress of humanity. We’ve been living on land for hundreds of thousands of years. I say perhaps it’s time to think outside the box and be creative. If seasteading can work for free societies, then ultra statists societies would also be free to seasteading if they can fund it. Perhaps a 1984 type seasteading state would be more to the authors liking.

I was always under the impression that socializing Land equally across the entire spectrum of humanity was the only way for each of us to have True Liberty which opens the door to Pure Democracy and a Pure Capitalistic Marketplace where we each have an equal footing to “play the game”. There is an easy way to accomplish this where individuals retain control over their property while the Land is held in Common by the Community -)

The Foundation of any Social Structure is the stabilizing factor. In terms of Life, Land is the Foundation. Treating Land as a commodity has been called the mother of all monopolies but on the flip side Socialized Land is the Mother of Liberty. Socializing Land across the entire human spectrum is The Secure Foundation. Using the United States as an example, there are currently over 3000 counties in the US. The way this works is the people of each county maintain 100% ownership of the Land in that county. Basing Land values on the currently assessed values, each “landowner” pays a Lease Fee into a Community Land fund which is then redistributed (100% of it) back to each resident in the county equally in the form of a yearly Land Dividend. Owners no longer own Land but lease it from the community. All of the improvements (houses, barns, gardens, etc…) are personally owned while the Land the improvements sit on Belongs Equally to every individual in that county. When someone sells his/her home they do not sell the Land but only the improvements. The new owner of the improvements takes over the Lease Fee. Sharing the Land in this manner effectively makes the Lease Fee on the average piece of Land exactly equal to the yearly Land Dividend. This makes Land equally affordable for everyone no matter income status. When individuals and families have security in Land they gain security in Life and are no longer beholden to another to procure Life’s basic necessities. It returns responsibility to the individual and in turn the community.

The reason why this needs to be done county by county is that the size of a county is small enough that individuals can actually get involved in the decisions that will directly impact their lives and by spreading these principles across 3000+ counties nationwide (in the US anyway) it makes it much more difficult to subvert such a system.

The Socialization of Land described above is The Foundation for Universal Liberty and the doorway to a True and Pure Capitalistic Economy in which local (county) resources are owned equally by Everyone in that county (Pure Democracy) and which rewards those who are Creative, Cooperative, Compassionate and Hard Working.

Weren’t libertarians the ones who advocate ending government monopoly on printing money? Historically, currency anarchism in a country has always brought it’s economy to collapse.
Governments and private monopolies/corporations are both evils, but libertarians seem to notice only the latter. How come?
That’s like destroying the police, but leaving the mafia.
I wonder, which of the two would pay to promote such an initiative?
Libertarians, especially the right-wing kind, simply pretend questions like the above have never occured to anybody.
Their silence is a sign of confirmation.

[...] Libertarian seasteaders dream of forcing governments to compete with each other to attract and hold valuable citizens. Seasteading enthusiasts like Patri Friedman imagine oceans filled with floating micro-states. "It’s almost like there’s a cartel of governments," he told Details magazine, "and this is a way to force governments to compete in a free-market way." [...]

The article is hysterical in the sense of a Batman parody. Surely the author does not intend us to take this distorted vision literally. If interpreted metaphorically, and with the aid of the stash that the author appears to indulge in, I could go with the vibes of this article if there were nothing good on the RetroTv channel.

I always find Sally Kohn amusing. She’s the ditzy blonde of Leftover lesbian politics. She’s never smart or well-read enough about whatever she is gassing on about not to put her foot in a big stinking pattie. The idea of her trying to read and comprehend any libertarian author – Nozick, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard – gives on a chuckle.

She’s afraid, as all the pro-regressives are, because they have always been intellectually outclassed by the libertarians, way back to when Mises demonstrated that socialism cannot allocate resources intelligently and when Hayek showed that Keynesianism actually causes business cycles. But now all kinds of average voters are reading Tom Woods, or Ron Paul, or Johan Norberg, or Cato Institute publications, and understand how government control of the money supply causes our problems too.

Funnily, Sally Kohn was on the hannity radio show a few months ago saying she would let Iran and Palestinian radicals wipe out Israel — or at least she would not prevent it. So her idea that libertarians — who believe every person owns himself and his life, body, time, energy and productivity — are homicidal is just projection from her ditzy teeny mind.